Ensure Proper Code Optimization With This Technical SEO Checklist

Can Search Engines Spider Your Site?

Great design doesn’t always mean great code. A website may look great and function properly in a browser. It may even have fabulous content. But what’s “under the hood” can make the difference between a top-ranked site and a low-ranked site. Most people—even site designers—don’t realize that some of the top-end programs used to design and build websites add a lot of extra junk to the code.

The net effect of this code, if allowed to remain in place, is to slow the ability of the search engine to quickly parse through your code and find the good stuff. This may cause the search engine to abandon your site or discourage it from continuing on to other pages that may also contain valuable information.

Junk code and other technical site issues can cause search engines to abandon your website or discourage them from continuing onto other pages.

Some coding elements can even completely prevent the spider from indexing your site at all. Bad navigation menus, framed sites, and improperly closed tags can prevent the search engine from viewing the content of the site as the viewer does. If the search engine cannot see it, your rankings will not accurately reflect the relevance of your pages for your most important search terms.

For the most part, this junk code is just unnecessary extra coding that can be moved to external files, cascading style sheets or removed altogether.